Is Your Unlived Life Calling? Here’s How to Answer.

What is your unlived life really about…

• Your longing to follow a calling that won’t go away? 
• Regret about choices made or not made?
• Dreams and desires you haven’t yet brought into being? 

Actually, your unlived life could be all of this, and more. So let’s dive in.

When I think of the unlived life, I remember an interview I watched a few years ago. A woman in midlife had followed a blossoming call and reinvented herself. She’d left behind a life that no longer suited her and created one filled with zest and enthusiasm. 

Not only was she living a very different life, she proposed that there were “a lot of other lives out there” and this kind of change was possible for everyone. 

As much as I admired her, these are the words that had the most impact on me:

You just have to let go and take some risks.

I was struck by them because they sounded so simple.

Truth is, letting go and taking risks to follow the  unlived life is rarely simple.

It gets complicated fast, especially when you consider that choosing what you truly want is rarely crystal clear. In fact, when reinvention is on your plate as you move through the twists, turns, and transitions of adulthood, you’re also being asked to let go of other lives waiting to be lived. Lives that might have been.

Ah, what might have been.

Is there anything more poignant? Closing off what might have been, ripe with all of its promise and possibility, can feel like an existential blow to your psyche when you’re in transitional periods of life. It can also be a recipe for overwhelm.

Jungian Analyst Robert Johnson offers wisdom about this.

In his book, Living Your Unlived Life, he states…

It can be useful to reclaim what is unlived in you externally, adjusting your life to express these potentials. However, often this is impractical or impossible…

Johnson gives us a gentle reality check for unlived lives.

While it would be wonderful if you could drop everything and go live that unlived life, it’s often impossible or impractical.

However, he goes on to say this too:

When we experience untapped potentials inwardly, on the level of symbolic life, often the experience goes deeper, is more intense, and produces more personal development. There are many realities that can only be taken in at the imaginal level. You can still live whatever path resides within you if you consent to explore symbolic life.

No longer do you need to force yourself to make a decision and get on with it. No longer do you sense you’re destined to be stuck in a place where life seems empty, repetitive, and meaningless.

Instead, you can consider the possibility that the information you’re seeking isn’t always out there. Rather, it’s deep within you, in the place where story, imagination, and archetypes reside.

By going there first you can figure out which lives need to be expressed as actions in the external world, and which lives are actually wanting you to join them on an inner journey.

Because the desire to…

• …start an organic gardening business might just be what it is. Or, it might be about developing a relationship with your Inner Nurturer. 
• …travel around the world might just be what it is. Or, it might be about opening yourself up to the Seeker within you.
• …return to school to study philosophy might just be what it is. Or, it might be about recognizing your wise, internal Sage.

You can begin by liberating the lives that are unlived within you.

If you’re experiencing a lot of lives waiting to be lived, they probably feel like a herd of penned-in wild horses, poised to break down the corral at the first crack of thunder. (And leaving mayhem in their wake.)

So let them out. Now. Gently. Be their horse whisperer.

Write them down, and keep going until each one has been released. Or make them into a mind map, letting them twist and turn and intertwine. Or gather them all on slips of paper, and stow them safely in their own special treasure box.

Once you’ve gentled them, live their story for a few moments by giving them a voice. Speak their words and write them down, as if you were in that life:

• I love organic gardening because it heals me, brings me back to my roots, and brings me into rhythm with the seasons.
• I spend my day outside, digging in the soil, planting.
• At the end of the day I feel fulfilled, satisfied, at peace.

These prompts can be used with any unlived life or unlived activity.

In my experience of using the prompts with clients for many years, I’ve discovered that once you step into them, you will probably find the life wants to keep talking, going far beyond the few words I’ve used here as an example.

And then an interesting thing may happen. You’ll start to notice themes. Or you’ll keep repeating yourself. Although on the surface each life may seem vastly different, you will likely find a shared story that lives within them.

You might discover stories of: creativity, wisdom, love, adventure, community, independence, balance, nature, meaning.

Whatever arrives, these are probably the life potentials that want your attention. 

And they can be lived in the external world, through small actions, or larger risks if you can take them. They can also be lived symbolically in the internal world, through grand imaginations.

You can write, paint, dance, collage, or sing them.

Engage with the life. Open up a dialogue. Tell it what you see. Ask it what it needs. Express to it what it feels like to begin to accept it.

You can meet it in your dreams.

And you can relieve its urgency to be lived in the external world by inviting it into your internal life.

From letting go to transformation.

In the end, there are still a lot of other lives out there. But the act of examining them is in itself a feat of personal alchemy. By giving them their freedom and listening to their stories, you are claiming the essence of what needs to be lived within you.

And by doing so, you transform “what might have been” into a rich life, both inner and outer.

I will not die an unlived life

I will not live in fear

of falling or catching fire.

I choose to inhabit my days,

to allow my living to open me,

to make me less afraid,

more accessible,

to loosen my heart

until it becomes a wing,

a torch, a promise.

I choose to risk my significance;

to live so that which came to me as seed

goes to the next as blossom

and that which came to me as blossom,

goes on as fruit.

-Dawna Markova